Pete Hegseth's Spiritual Leader Not Real Big On Women Having Rights, Imagine That
We can see what attracted Hegseth to this guy.
Boy, blubbering inebriate Pete Hegseth has had himself a week. First, the Defense secretary announced he would restore a giant Confederate monument to Arlington National Cemetery, because what better way to honor America’s warfighters than to celebrate a bunch of traitors who killed hundreds of thousands of them?
Then before we could even finish absorbing that atrocity, Hegseth raised a few eyebrows by posting to Twitter an interview CNN’s Pamela Brown did with Doug Wilson, the head of Christ Church, an Idaho-based church and the base of a denomination called the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), which just opened a new branch in Washington DC. Pete Hegseth and his family are some of its more famous parishioners, and in a CREC church near Nashville, where Hegseth lives.
What raised eyebrows was Wilson in the interview expressing his view that women should not be allowed to vote, presumably because chicks, amirite, fellas?
That wasn’t how he phrased it, of course. Wilson is one of those Christians who believes that men are the head of the household and the only beings who can be entrusted with the most basic action of democracy. Wives should instead submit to their husbands and spend their lives raising “three or four or five eternal souls,” by which Wilson means they should find total life fulfillment shooting children out one after the other like one of those t-shirt cannons they fire between innings at baseball games, and absolutely nothing else.
Voting? Wilson's fine with it, so long as it’s not women voting. Women, as two of his parishioners tell Brown, should submit to their husbands. According to a couple of affiliated pastors CNN interviewed, which candidate to vote for is something they are open to discussing with their wives, at least, so congrats, ladies, maybe your husbands will evolve on this issue sometime in the next few hundred years.
And yes, we mean submit in every sense of the word. Vice had a whole story a few years ago about the winking and nodding at marital rape that’s reportedly endemic in Wilson’s church, in which a former member told her story:
She tried clawing away, then pushing him away with her arms. He pinned her down, so she used her legs to kick him. That’s when he unbuttoned his pants. “When he was done, he passed out drunk and I locked myself in the bathroom and cried.” She was bruised and her insides bled.
“These pastors told me a wife is not allowed to tell her husband no.”
She called a kirker friend about it the next day. The friend attended a Christ Church plant—a seedling congregation based in Christ Church’s doctrine and culture—and “she said the same thing was going on in her marriage.” Marital rape, it seemed, was normal. So, Jean didn’t report it. Jean’s husband raped her over and again a couple of times a week for about a decade, either with violence or by waiting until after she took a prescription sleeping pill.
Charming.
Brown also noted to Wilson that there are no women in leadership roles at his church. Asked if he accepts women in leadership in church and government, Wilson replied that no, the Bible tells him not to.
Hegseth appears to have his own ways of making sure professional women learn their place in his personal pecking order. Since assuming office, Hegseth has been purging the upper ranks of female officers at an alarming rate. He fired a vice admiral who was the first woman to lead the Naval Academy, a vice admiral who served as a high-ranking NATO representative, the highest-ranking female officer in the Navy, and the first woman to ever lead the Coast Guard.
Isn’t this neat? We’ve always wondered what it must have been like to serve in the Crusades under the incompetent weirdo Guy of Lusignan. But now we don’t have to imagine, we’ve got our very own!
There is a great irony in Hegseth posting this video of Wilson demeaning women and their place in society, considering that he infamously brings his wife to national security meetings and supposedly has had her conducting job interviews for open positions at the Pentagon that he needs to fill. This does not sound like a woman who is exactly living by the tenets of the head of her church.
And how does she find the time, since the Hegseths have a total of seven kids from their multiple marriages? Sounds like someone has been reading Lean In.
It is no secret that Hegseth is a Christian nationalist. And that would be okay if he wants to spend his weekends leading a militia made up of a dozen insurance salesmen and bait shop owners into the woods to playact as modern-day Crusaders preparing for the day when they will be called upon to overthrow America’s secular government.
It is much less okay for a man in charge of the world’s largest military, including its civilian bureaucracy, in which hundreds of thousands of women serve. The fact that Hegseth is so prominently endorsing the beliefs of this church are a giant flashing warning sign — as if we needed yet another one — about what kind of a world this administration would like to bring into being.
[CNN]
Support independent media by giving Wonkette money.
Weird how what God commands them to do aligns so perfectly with what they want to do.
The biggest story here is that professional drunk and traitor, Pete Kegsbreth, has a "pastor."
The fact that said "pastor" is a vicious, bigoted hypocrite is only to be expected.